Adventures in Public Transportation

Well, we had the big move and since our new house is only about 1 mile from the Brentwood Metrolink station and the university gives us a free pass I thought I would try it out and save some wear and tear on the car, and help the environment. So yesterday I tested the "Park and Ride" service by driving the 1 mile to the large Meridian parking garage and then taking the Metro to campus. That worked as smooth as silk. You drive up the the fifth floor, and park, take a fast elevator down and walk a few hundred feet to the platform. It could not be much easier.

However, it seemed weird to drive 1 mile to travel 3.5 miles, so I thought I would try out my perfectly healthy legs and walk to the station today. The first part of my walk towards Eager and Brentwood was simple and uneventful. However, once I came to the intersection and saw the six lanes of traffic I would have to cross on foot, I decided to at least walk down to Rose and cross there so it was not so massive of an intersection. I pressed the crossing button which game out a strange beep but eventually allowed me to cross the six lanes without becoming road kill. I decided I did not want to walk along Eager so I followed Rose until it took me into the Brentwood Promenade shopping plaza. I could see the tall Meridian parking garage where I had parked just yesterday and thought I could just walk straight to there. Wrong. There was a large walled barrier running behind PetsMart, so I ended up walking up Withrow past all the storefronts to Eager and along Eager to the Metro station. One oddity I noticed was walking along Eager to the Metro station there were no crosswalks at Hanley Industrial Court or even across the street for the parking garage to the Metro station. And the sidewalk leading to the Metro station was laughable too since you have to cross the parking garage road twice to get to the station if walking from Eager. As Jay Leno would say, "Are Americans so fat and lazy we have to drive to a parking garage to take public transportation?". The station was obviously designed as a Park and Ride only, and not for people who would actually consider walking a mile to get to a station. This evening on my return trip I am going to try a different walking route from the station to see if another route is a more "walking friendly" than what I experienced this morning.

Another item that is sad is seeing all these covered bench Metrobus stops that are now simply "waiting rooms for nothing" that used to serve bus routes that no longer run. I know when walking through Brentwood Forest, you see several stops that I remember riding by when I rode the bus occasionally from campus as a student about 20 years ago. They remain as reminders of a bus system that keeps getting cut back to be as unusable as possible. I was actually going to take the bus this morning, but having walked down to Brentwood Boulevard so quickly and easily, I thought I would save time and continue walking to Metrolink since the train is twice as fast getting to campus as the bus. I will have to try the bus some other day as well as I continue my Adventures in Public Transportation....